


Skin

by the_alchemist



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Tattoos, Bodyguard, F/F, Gangs, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Ramsay is his own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 01:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4285851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/pseuds/the_alchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-apocalyptic AU. Cat's family were once major players in the network of gangs fighting for control of the half-ruined City, but she has buried a husband and four children, and - worse - her fifth remains unburied. When all others have failed, she sends her faithful bodyguard Brienne to find the corpse.</p><p>Gen with hints of femslash (Catelyn/Brienne). </p><p>Ramsay is his own warning. (Brief graphic violence, some body horror.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FreshBrains](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshBrains/gifts).



In the failing light of a winter afternoon, a mother and her two daughters plied their needles.

Cat herself was no mean needlewoman, but Sansa – she realised – was something else. Light and darkness were at her command; she could show the world as it is, and she could bring to birth new worlds.

 ‘This is stupid!’

 Cat and Sansa looked up, blinking.

 ‘ _You’re_ stupid,’ said Sansa.

 ‘Girls!’ said Cat.

 ‘But it _is_ stupid,’ said Arya. ‘I’m no good at it and I don’t want to be any good at it, and there’s no point and it’s gross!’ At this last word, she dropped the bloody lump of pigskin onto the floor and threw the tattoo iron across the room.

 

(Every child writes itself on its mothers body: the stretchmarks, the torn flesh, the sagging teats. But Cat’s children had written themselves twice, they gave back the beauty they took away. Yes, even Arya’s mark – a badly drawn sword – was beautiful to Cat. Arya had wanted hers made for her, like her brothers, but Cat had insisted. ‘If you never pick up the iron again,’ she said, ‘you will do this for me.’)

 

‘You don’t need to look away,’ said Cat, walking naked out of the washroom, drying herself. She lived in what they called a ‘safe house’ now, though it wasn’t particularly safe, and it wasn’t a house. In the days when ordinary people could afford cars, it had been a row of garages.

Brienne lifted her eyes without lifting her head. ‘Ma’am.’ She blushed.

Cat used to have a car, and a driver, and five bodyguards, back when Ed was He-boss of the Northside. Now she had no car, and no-one but Brienne. She lay down on the bunk. Not long ago, the Starks controlled a full third of the City. Men fought one another to take her ink, and women killed to have their daughters apprenticed to her. The She-bosses of the other Families sent spies to learn the secrets of her art.

She still had her irons and inks, of course. Still worked, even. Risky as it was, she had to eat somehow. Of course, she disguised her style, tried to ape the backstreet fakers who in turn tried to ape her, or at least the person she had been.

Brienne had looked away again. ‘I know,’ said Cat. ‘It is an old woman’s body.’

‘Oh!’ Said Brienne. ‘No. No! It isn’t that. You are … you are very beautiful, Ma’am.’

Cat inclined her head. ‘I pay you to protect me,’ she said. ‘Not to flatter me.’

‘It isn’t flattery.’ Brienne’s vehemence surprised them both. ‘Ma’am,’ she added.

Cat held out her hand, and led Brienne to sit on the side of the bunk. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let me feel that I am still a mother. Let me show you all I have of my children.’

Brienne shivered a little. It felt wrong to be this close, and she loved it.

‘This is my oldest, my firstborn.’ Cat guided Brienne’s hand to the direwolf snarling across her solar plexus. ‘Rob was the only one who didn’t get to choose: it’s traditional that the heir gets the family’s sign.’

‘And this is poor Arya.’ The simple representation of a sword was on her right arm: a long triangle for the blade, and an upside-down t-shape for the hilt. One long edge of the triangle was wobbly.

Cat turned onto her side to show her left arm. ‘This is Bran,’ she said.

‘A raven?’ said Brienne. ‘A three-eyed raven?’

‘I don’t know why,’ Cat said. ‘Bran insisted.’ She smiled at the memory of him. ‘He was a strange child, and he knew his mind. More than any of them, I wonder what he would have been had he lived to be a man.’

The fourth was a solid black circle, over Cat’s womb. ‘Rickon,’ she said. ‘He didn’t live long enough for the ceremony. If he’d had a funeral I could have taken one then, to celebrate his life, but there was no funeral, no body to hold, and my own body barren.’

She was silent for so long, that Brienne thought she had finished, but Cat was only lost in her thoughts. ‘And Sansa,’ she finally said, turning round.

Brienne saw her back for the first time, and felt her heart jump. ‘It’s beautiful.’

In the hands of a lesser artist, the scene would have been clichéd: a knight kneeling before his lady in a garden. It wasn’t quite natural: the lines of the trees and fountain were a little lengthened, and the honeysuckle tendrils were curved too perfectly. Every bird and flower was in exactly the right place. But it was the faces that mesmerised Brienne: the curve of the lady’s lips that said: ‘this is a game, a private joke between us, and yet it is more solemn and real than anything that has ever been’; the sparkle in the knight’s eyes, which said ‘I know.’

Suddenly Cat turned. ‘Do you believe in heaven?’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’

‘I wish I could believe she’s there, in that garden’ said Cat. ‘I wish I could believe that’s where she went after she … after everything. And she’s walking there now, by that fountain, the sun on her face, and laughing, and laughing.’

  

Over the months, Cat had employed half a dozen private detectives to find Sansa’s body. The others she had buried with her own hands. She took consolation from that, and from the fact their deaths were quick. Sansa's, she feared, was not.

It was odd that people still called them _private_ detectives. It wasn’t as though there was any other kind. Cat was old enough to remember when there were police, courts, governments. But the days before the war, before the winter, hardly seemed real any more.

‘Let _me_ go,’ said Brienne, a week after Cat had shown her naked body, the day the last of the detectives came back empty-handed.

‘Hmm?’ Cat looked up from her drawing board. The punter had asked for a lion’s head, in honour of the new He-boss. She took something like pleasure in fulfilling his request since she knew that it’s true meaning was the opposite from what he intended. It should have been a lion rampant: a head without a body meant death and shame.

‘Let me go and find her,’ Brienne continued. ‘No-one here knows who you are – they all think you’re dead. You don’t need a bodyguard. And those ... those _men_ you hire are sucking you dry.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Cat, ‘sometimes I think I don’t want to know. When I think of those other poor girls ...’

Perhaps a dozen bodies had been found, all dumped by the roadside. They were skinless, apart from a patch on the stomach or buttocks, on which he’d tattooed his moniker: the Beast of Bolton.

‘It might not have been him,’ said Brienne. ‘The letter could have been a fake.’

Cat shook her head. ‘A mother knows.’ But with each day that passed, that word, ‘mother’, made her feel more like a fraud. She sank into herself, holding her face in her hands, and wept.

 

A mother knows. And Brienne knew too. It was presumptuous, she supposed, to think of herself as Sansa’s stepmother, but the thought had come upon her so slowly that once she noticed it, it was too firm to dislodge.

‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Is anybody there?’

It was an oldhouse, like the garages it had been built before the war. Part of the walls, as well as the basement, were made from red bricks, from cement and concrete that bore the marks of ages long past. The first room had been salvaged to nothing, and she followed the path through the dust to the second room, then down the stairs, and through a passageway and down and down, until she came to his hall.

The smell was musty and faintly rotten. It was lit by dim oil lamps. There was something medieval about it. Something of the darkness that counterbalanced the light of the garden on her Lady’s back. The wall hangings depicted macabre scenes of death and torture. She turned away, but they were everywhere. Even the ceilings were hung with banners the shape of ... gods, no, not only the shape of ... they _were_ human skin. The pale expanse of torso an artist’s canvas depicting his fantasies, and the translucent yellow-and-brown limbs hanging down in crispy, shrivelled tubes.

Brienne felt her teeth clench, and the hand on the hilt of her knife was shaking, but she continued to walk forward.

He aimed, she supposed, to surprise her, leaping out from behind one of the hangings more like an animal than a man. But her reflexes were too fast for him – for her, even – and almost before she knew what was happening she was looking down at his jerking body, watching the blood pulse from his throat in the flickering lamplight.

‘Gods,’ she repeated, and reached up to touch one of the hangings. Was that Sansa? Or was that? (Still, he was chocking and gurgling.) She supposed she would lie to Cat: it was an awful thought, but better than telling the truth. (She stabbed him again, the noises stopped, and he was still.) But something wasn’t quite right – wrong in a different way from the world of wrong that surrounded her – she just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Somewhere, something dripped.

As her eyes got used to the light, she began to see more detail. There was furniture too, covered with human skin. And then some movement caught her eye. A rat? No. The figure – naked – unfolded itself and stood, staring at her, hollow-eyed.

‘My Lady Sansa.’ Brienne knelt. Yes. That was it. Although the subject matter of the hangings was vile, and its medium grotesque, the style was unmistakable: her Lady’s daughter was artist, and not canvas.

 

They sold everything they had and paid a smuggler to take them outside the City, somewhere no-one had heard of Cat’s family, or of any of the Families. At first, Brienne’s strength paid for their bread, then Cat’s skill. Sansa worked in the fields until her arms and legs were strong, and her hands calloused, no longer an artist’s hands but a peasant’s. Sometimes Cat wept to think of what her daughter had been, and what she was, but when Sansa looked down on her own hands she smiled.


End file.
